NBER Reporter: 2011 Number 4 Profiles

NBER Profile: John R. Graham

John Graham is a Research Associate in the NBER's Corporate Finance Program and a professor of Finance at Duke University. He is also faculty co-director of Duke's Center for Financial Excellence.

Graham received his bachelor's degree in math and economics at the College of William and Mary in 1983, his Masters of economics at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1988, and his Ph.D. in finance at Duke University in 1994. Prior to joining the faculty at Duke, he taught at the University of Utah and worked as a senior economist at Virginia Power.

Graham's research focuses primarily on corporate finance issues including the choice of capital structure, payout policy, risk management, corporate diversification, taxes, and compensation. He is co-author of a textbook, Corporate Finance: Linking Theory to What Companies Do, now in its third edition and published by South-Western Cengage Learning. Graham is also co-editor of the Journal of Finance, director of the Global Business Outlook quarterly survey of CFOs, and Vice President of the Western Finance Association.

Graham was born in Beaumont, Texas and grew up primarily in Wilmington, Delaware. He currently lives in Chapel Hill, NC with his wife Suzanne and three children: Matt, Laura, and Rebecca. He spends his free time gardening, playing and coaching sports, and participating in church activities.

NBER Profile: Ann E. Harrison

Ann E. Harrison is a Research Associate in the NBER's Programs in International Trade and Investment and Environmental and Energy Economics. She received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and her Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University in 1991. Since 2001, Harrison has been a Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. She previously taught at the University of Paris, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and Columbia Business School.

Harrison spent the last two years at the World Bank, where she was the Director of Development Policy. Prior to that, she was the Bank's manager for trade research. On January 1, 2012 she will be joining the faculty of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania as Professor of Management.

Harrison's research is in the area of international trade, foreign investment, and economic development. She has analyzed the impact of globalization on domestic labor markets, the linkages between productivity and trade reform, and the impact of foreign investment on host countries. She is the editor of the NBER book, Globalization and Poverty, and her articles have been published in the American Economic Review, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of International Economics, the Journal of Labor Economics, and elsewhere. Her latest research analyzes anti-sweatshop activism, the impact of offshoring on wages and employment, the pros and cons of industrial policy, and the determinants of firm performance in India and China.

Harrison was born in France and raised in California. She is married to the economist Vicente Madrigal and has two children: Emily (16) and Alice (11). As a family, they enjoy reading, cooking, and traveling together.

NBER Profile: Margaret S. McMillan

Margaret McMillan is an associate professor of economics at Tufts University and a Research Associate in the NBER's Program on International Trade and Investment. She holds a B.A. in mathematics and economics from Boston University, an MPA from Princeton University, and a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University.

McMillan was appointed the Director of the Development Strategies and Governance Division of the International Food Policy Research Institute in 2009. Before joining a university faculty, she had taught math in the Republic of Mali, managed a project for the World Bank in the United Republic of Tanzania, and worked as a financial analyst at Lehman Brothers.

McMillan is the recipient of numerous awards for her research. In 2005, she was named the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is also currently the principal investigator on a multi-million dollar project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom designed to enhance the understanding of economic growth and structural change in Sub-Saharan Africa.

McMillan lives in Newton, MA with her husband, Pierluigi Balduzzi, and their ten-year-old daughter, Anna.

NBER Profile: Antoinette Schoar

Antoinette Schoar is an NBER Research Associate in the Program on Corporate Finance and chair of the NBER's Entrepreneurship Working Group. She is also the Michael M. Koerner ('49) Professor of Entrepreneurial Finance at MIT's Sloan School of Management.

After receiving her undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Cologne (Germany), Schoar earned her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago in 2000. She joined the Sloan School faculty that year and became a tenured professor in 2005.

Schoar's research interests range from entrepreneurship and the financing of small businesses in emerging markets to household finance and intermediation in retail financial markets. She also is a cofounder of ideas42, a research lab on behavioral social science. In 2003, her paper "The Effects of Corporate Diversification on Productivity" won the Journal of Finance Brattle Prize. She also received the prestigious Kauffman Prize Medal for Distinguished Research in Entrepreneurship in 2009.

Schoar's work has been published in the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and other journals. She is also an associate editor of both the Journal of Finance and the American Economic Journal in Applied Economics.

NBER Profile: V. Kerry Smith

V. Kerry Smith is a Research Associate in the NBER's Program on Environmental and Energy Economics. He is also Regents' Professor of Economics at Arizona State University and a University Fellow at Resources for the Future.

Smith received his PhD in Economics from Rutgers University in "what no doubt seems like another lifetime": 1970. His research focuses on measuring the economic tradeoffs that individuals make to enhance environmental quality and to reduce environmental sources of risk. His recent research has focused on evaluating alterative modeling strategies for introducing environmental services into static and dynamic computational equilibrium models, both at the regional and national levels.

In addition to this research, he has studied the evaluation of homeland security policies. He is currently working with Central Arizona Project's Long-Term Ecological Research and the Decision Center for a Desert City, both NSF-sponsored activities, to develop strategies to integrate natural and social sciences into the development of sustainable policies for arid urban environments.

Kerry lives in Cave Creek, Arizona with his wife Pauline. They have two children, Tim and Shelley, plus two terrific grandsons, Jake and Sam.

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